The War to End AllNov 11, 2005

Global

Peggy L. Elliott

November eleventh, at eleven o’clock we still pause and send up our prayers to those who paid the ultimate price for our liberty and way of life, and in greatest appreciation for all those who have swallowed back the gut-wrenching wall of fear in order to run onto an enemy fortified beach, muck their way through infested jungle swamps, turn their faces into blinding desert sands.

There’s not a single one of these men - and now women - who would not long to be anywhere else, doing anything else, but they went as told to go, as have the multitudes before them, to do what they hope needs to be done.  You can not tell a man cradling the now stilled body of his best buddy, a twenty-year-old who thought being a soldier on the weekends would be an okay way of making some extra money and paying for his college, that this boy died for nothing.

For worse than nothing - for the greed, avarice and power-hungry drive of old men who run the world from darkened rooms, whose faces are never seen, but whose decisions control every aspect of our lives, worldwide.

Human beings are, by nature, violent creatures.  From the beginning of traceable time, they’ve been at war with each other.  Grunting, hairy males thrashing about with long sticks, hurling stones, hunting food, shelter, each other.  Someone always has less and wants more, be it a bigger cave or all the oil in the world.

So, for the naive citizens of the world fought the “War to End All Wars” there were many highly placed amongst them who knew better.  Who knew that war was a necessary evil, important to the continuation of this or that race, over this or that race.

In some ways, though, it was a war that ended all wars - at least the way wars were fought up until that time.  For in this war how we viewed ourselves in sense of fair-play and knightly character, what had been held as important virtues in a still-courtly civilization, came to a crashing, stunning end.

No more to face the enemy across the field, bright colors flying, bands playing, a spectacle of valor and righteousness, the doughboys dug themselves into rat-infested trenches, filled with filth and fear, where they died by the millions.  Faceless, nameless victims marched off to glorious war with flags unfurled before them, expecting what had been the just cause and noble battles of which their forebears often spoke, instead to find themselves on the front line of modern warfare - death by technology.

Those who survived returned home broken, scarred in ways no one who had not been through their war could understand.  “Shell Shock” was newly introduced during this war and it is still reaching out and claiming its victims.  It’s what happens to a person who knows not from where death will fall upon them. 

Mathew Brady brought the true face of war into the homes of those left behind when, during the bloody American Civil War, he followed the battling troops, recording their lives - and deaths - through the lens of his camera.  Gone was the noble effort royally depicted in oils on canvas of great battles, greater leaders, their troops pressed in neat combat.

Yet as desperate and bloody as were the scenes Brady impressed upon an 1860’s America, there was still honor to be upheld.  Those soldiers marched into battle armed with a code of conduct cultivated in a time of gentler manners, higher expectations - you were expected to be gentlemen, even in the face of death. 

This last vestige of humanity, even in the hell in which it still survived, died along with an Archduke in the summer of 1914.  No one took note of its passing - it was not yet known, not until the first troops fired the first shots and dug in did it become apparent that this was not going to be like any war known before.

At least we have stopped calling our wars the “One to End All Wars.” Even the “War to End All Wars” was unceremoniously changed to WWI.  WWII, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, all the wars in the Gulf, around the Gulf, in the Sinai, around the Sinai, in Eastern Europe, in Asia Major and Minor, in the Islands all over the world, throughout the African continent, civil wars, uprisings, wars for land, wars for food, wars for the sake of war - all of it going on now.  A World at War.

My daughter - my only child - gave birth to her own daughter this past June.  A baby born in the late spring of the year, how much more faith in the power of good and the beauty that dwells within all life can be offered forth to this world?  And when are we going to demand that this world be worthy of these oh, so precious offerings?  So that no babies born today will have to live through the hell of the war mankind senselessly, needlessly and, please not, endlessly wages upon itself.

It can be done, you know.  One way or another, we have the capability to end all war.  Lets pray to God, or Allah, or to all the powers that be, we choose the way of peace and acceptance, and not of annihilation.

Amen.